Negotin Premieres Rukoveti Choir and Ballet Spectacle
Eight of Mokranjac's fifteen Rukoveti received choreography for the first time, as the choir and ballet of the National Theatre premiered a choir and ballet spectacle at the 60th Mokranjac Days.
The Stevan Mokranjac House of Culture in Negotin had no empty seat last night, and when the stage lights went dark after the final note, the audience stood and applauded for a long time. The Choir and Ballet of the National Theatre in Belgrade premiered Rukoveti on September 15, a choir and ballet spectacle set to the music of Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac, as part of the jubilee 60th Mokranjac Days music festival. The ovation was no formality: in a hall that knows every note of this work, it was a verdict.
Rukoveti is the foundation of Serbia’s choral heritage, a cycle in which Mokranjac, working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, gathered folk songs from different regions and shaped them into fifteen self contained wreaths. Eight were chosen for this occasion, the second, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, twelfth and fifteenth, and that selection is not a random run of numbers but a dramatic arc: from joy and love, through unrest and suffering, to hope and rebirth. Putting such an arc on stage means accepting that the choir, which until now carried the full weight of the performance, now shares the space with a moving body.
The performance was musically prepared by conductor Jelena Miljevic, head of the Choir, while Jovica Begojev authored the concept and choreography. Alongside him, individual Rukoveti carry the signatures of Milica Jevic Drndarevic, Milos Zivanovic, Sanja Ninkovic, Maja Varicak Antic and Ivana Savic Jacic, six different choreographic voices working on a single piece, itself both a risk and a gesture of trust in a shared tone.
What sets this staging apart from a standard concert performance of Rukoveti is the decision not to illustrate the voice through movement, but to let movement join it as an equal voice. The choir here carries the strength of collective memory, what is shared and repeatable in a folk song, while the dancers explore what is individual within that same song: love, belonging, loss, suffering, unity with nature. When the two lines align, tradition stops being an archival object and becomes something that, literally, happens again in front of the audience.
The creative team behind the scenes is just as responsible for that effect as those on stage. Piano collaborator Natalija Mijailovic, costume design by Olga Mrdjenovic and set design by Miras Vuksanovic built a frame in which the choir and ballet do not compete for attention but alternate without interruption, no small thing for a choir and ballet format: too many stagings of this kind fail exactly at that seam, when the music stops so the dance can “catch up,” or the other way around. Here, judging by the hall’s reaction, that seam did not show.
After the performance, the acting director of the National Theatre, Dragoljub Bajic, received the festival’s plaque marking the jubilee 60 years of Mokranjac Days, awarded by the Stevan Mokranjac House of Culture. The recognition arrives in a year that also marks the 170th anniversary of the composer’s birth, which makes the Negotin premiere more than just another entry in a festival program that this year, over nine days from September 12 to 20, counts 35 events. It is also a reminder that the city where Mokranjac was born can still bring him back to the stage in a way that is anything but a museum piece.
Whether this pairing of choir and ballet becomes a lasting form for Rukoveti or remains a one off festival gesture will be shown by future performances in Belgrade, if there are any. For now, Negotin has its most famous composer in a version where you do not just listen to the song, you also watch it walk.
